


devourer of worlds, queen of heaven

by LusBeatha



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aziraphale Has a Vulva (Good Omens), Canon-Typical Alcoholism, Crowley Has A Vulva (Good Omens), Crowley Has Chronic Pain (Good Omens), Crowley Has PTSD (Good Omens), Crowley's Century-Long Nap (Good Omens), Cunnilingus, Established Relationship, F/F, Implied/Referenced Torture, Ineffable Wives (Good Omens), Light BDSM, Light Dom/sub, Non-Linear Narrative, Semi-Public Sex, Switching, Trust Issues, Vaginal Fingering, a little dark but less dark than the tags make it sound, everything's a fertility rite when your love literally makes the flowers bloom, implied temporary discorporation, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-10
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2020-12-07 18:30:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20980436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LusBeatha/pseuds/LusBeatha
Summary: Aziraphale dislikes when her wife must return to the underworld.  Crowley once started a cult to the goddess Ashtoreth.  England experiences some unusual weather patterns.  These are not unrelated phenomena.





	1. I

“Listen,” Crowley says, miracling up her bootlaces with a sheathed demonic ritual knife held between her teeth and a slew of infernal paperwork spilling from its overstuffed folders at her feet, “I have to give my report tonight, and if I’m not back for a few months, er, years, do you think you could check in on the plants? In case they’re misbehaving. Maybe some water.”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale asks deliberately, concern lurching like a live snake in her belly, “are you alright? I mean, did something go wrong? Did you do something… _ good_?”

The demon waves a restless hand. “Oh, no, nothing like that. They’re like this Down There, you know - every few centuries they make an excuse. I’m sure I’ve done nothing good lately.” Crowley's sunglasses in this decade are tinted faintly blue, and a bit lighter than usual, so that Aziraphale can discern the dark slits of her pupils.

“Well then, what if we go out tonight and start something hellish together,” suggests the angel. The shelves of books behind her head frame her bright face like a halo, the gilded lettering in their spines like sun-rays bent into sigils. “And then maybe your bosses will be feeling a bit more favourable when you report.”

Crowley hisses an incredulous chortle, tongue slithering visible between her lips. “You’re ridiculous,” she murmurs, affection catching in her throat. “Just water the plants. And don't go spoiling them. No more than once a week. Careful with the yucca - it’s gonna bloom soon.”

When she descends the escalator to Hell, Crowley leaves a springtime where hyacinths blossom in window-boxes and dense clusters of lilacs nod heavily in their hedges and apple trees are setting leafy clusters of pastel buds, where Aziraphale presses violets in paper between the pages of her books and says, “Listen, don’t get held up too long because there’s the festival next year, and we promised that we’d go the symphony again _ before _next century,” and draws out their last kiss for a few seconds too long while Crowley’s pronged tongue tastes her worry.

-

“I will always come back, darling,” Aziraphale soothes into Crowley's too-tight embrace, the demon clinging to her as tight as a bittersweet-vine after she returns from Heaven an hour later than expected. For a hell-creature with flawless night-vision, the demon almost seems to dread being alone in the darkness.

Her head office weren’t, the angel thinks, entirely convinced that Aziraphale is doing everything within her divine power to thwart the pagan cult of Ashtoreth.

“Of course you will.” Crowley lifts her head with a fond, crooked grin that doesn’t fool either of them. In these centuries, Crowley always smells of temple incense and bronze polish and jasmine, and her political status allows her to keep her sharp eyes uncovered. “You _ worship _ me.”

-

It spreads like a sudden summer: the soil cracks like poorly-fired pottery while the flora wilts for miles around, painting gardens and parks a sickly bleached-yellow. Parched daisies wither from between cracks and drop translucent petals onto the scorching pavement. The air blows thick and hot as a lightning-storm on Venus, until even London clasps their hands and plead for angelic intervention.

The angel in question is asleep in her bookshop, forehead resting against the crease of an open book, hair falling into her mouth, passing the time until her wife returns. Crowley had first taught Aziraphale to sleep in the third century, and she’d found it had some uses when one was striving to evade reality.

Her shop has been closed for months. There is never more than one light in the window at A.Z Fell & Co., and its owner rarely leaves the building.

She pulls at her straw-gold hair in worry as she mists the plants in Crowley’s flat, and she frets to them, and she reassures them that their mother will be home soon, and they try not to take this as a threat because they know that the angel misses her wife terribly. Aziraphale sets the plant-mister away in a trance and rambles home, the sidewalk hellfire-hot beneath her heels, past city trees even more melancholic than usual, hardly marking that Crowley’s luscious indoor garden contains the only verdant foliage left in England.

-

“Oh, my darling angel!” Crowley floods into the room like a wisp of shadow, looking drained but not unwell, after summer has turned to a dry autumn with no winter in sight. Heart leaping in her chest like a dog at a doorbell, she crouches down in front of Aziraphale, clutching at the carved wooden arms of her chair and examining her slumbering face with bemused concern. “You’re gonna cause a famine if you keep this up.”

The angel, who had been dozing open-mouthed with her head against the upholstery, straightens so quickly that she nearly collides with Crowley, who is just leaning up to embrace her. “You’re back! Oh, dear. Did I do it again? I hadn’t really noticed. Dear Lord, I’ve missed you,” she inhales the words between breathless kisses. “I’ve barely done any work in months.”

Beyond the dusty windows, the surreal drought retreats like an oven knob switched off, and London succumbs to its usual damp state for the first time since Crowley had reported to her supervisors. Winter will be balmy and pleasant, this year, with just enough snow for Aziraphale to read a book by the fire and observe the weather through the frosted window.

“Done any work? You’re quite literally withering the crops, angel.” Straddled across the armchair, Crowley resists the urge to launch her shivering coldblooded body against her wife and say, I was so cold, how could anybody ever be so cold in Hell, how do they even _find _a cold place to keep you in Hell. “It’s not that I’m not flattered, but you’ve really got to work on this. I’m gonna have to descend into the underworld, every once in a while. It’s part of the occupation.”

-

Four-year-old Warlock will ask Sister Francis why it’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. And she will want to say: because God is good and makes the flowers grow, and so forth. But she can’t, not in this case. “Ask your nanny about it,” she’ll say, letting her persona slip just this once. “She tells the best stories.”

-

Children are born. Children grow up. Sometimes almost makes you feel that you’re missing something. Just being Created. Like a galaxy pulled out of nothing with an exclamation of Light.

You mature differently, in any case, when you’re born full-formed and spend the millennia watching civilizations fall. You love on a different scale, when you came into being before Time.

-

A caustic smell, like skunk, or battery-acid, mingles on the air with the black smoke of household rubbish burned in metal bins, and something sallow, like the lingering wrongness of a fumigated berry field. Crowley is a creature of fire and torment and so forth, the charred remains of what once was an angel, but this is particularly revulsive. It's faintly comforting that she did not miss much in her most recent stint in Hell.

Aziraphale is ducking away from the stink with a paisley-patterned kerchief tied over her mouth. Angels, as a rule, cannot take ill, but she has a faded look around the corners of her eyes. It’s 1975, though she's wearing the same pale green-and-white checkered skirt she’d been wearing in 1925 and also 1895, now worn threadbare around the hems.

“Come here,” Crowley coos, “let me do your wings.”

“Nothing to worry about,” Aziraphale protests too swiftly, the words already waiting behind her lips.

Crowley sighs. “When they get bad again, will your humility please the Lord?”

“You don’t have to be like that.” Aziraphale is already sinking down into the bedclothes in front of the demon and drawing out her wings. Crowley shows that she cares entirely by saying nasty things about God. If she wasn’t, it would mean she didn’t really care at all.

“Course I do. My demonic nature.” The demon runs a bony hand gingerly over the offending feathers - like sinking one's hand into the finest silk imaginable, but left unravelled in tatters on a warehouse floor. Aziraphale flinches, and she moves her hand back to a row of ragged feathers clumped around the wrist of her wing. Sickly lines of dust and pollution are caught in the vanes of her pale feathers.

Hell has some fantastically inventive ways of hurting you, but nothing so crushing, Crowley thinks, as Aziraphale deliberately refusing to take care of herself in the name of piety.

Wait: there is one thing more crushing. It’s Aziraphale refusing to take care of herself in the name of Crowley. It’s Aziraphale swooning against the couch and saying, _ I simply cannot go on until my lover has returned to me! _ It’s touching, in its own way, but also a kick in her already-bruised ribs.

“It doesn’t please me,” Crowley says slowly, realizing what is actually going on. “It makes me absolutely bloody furious to see anything ever hurt you at all. If you’re trying to worship me, I can think of a thousand other fantastic ways to do so, than to neglect your wings until they look like a pidgeon’s that’s been run over by a train.”

“I’m sorry, love.” Aziraphale chews at her bottom lip, abashed. “I miss you when you’re away, that’s all.”

"Neglect the wellbeing of the whole bloody country," Crowley says, "leave the grain to wither in the fields and so forth, but - "

_ Take care of the only altar where I'll ever worship. _

_ \- _

Heaven, Crowley thinks, Heaven was just the excruciating disconnect of groping around for something that you knew was there but could never find. At the time she’d thought it was her_ worth as an angel _ or her _divine meaning for existence _or some such inanity. Later, she’ll think, it was _ holiness_.

But there was no holiness in Heaven. There’s holiness in Aziraphale, half-dancing alone in the backroom to music that Crowley cannot hear. The angel raises one arm toward the ceiling and twirls, humming under her breath in a manner that makes even the moss and lichen on the city bridges stand taller, and then stops abruptly to pull the right book from the shelf. Her tousled curls fall across her ocean-blue eyes, and she’s everything that Heaven failed to be, everything that got lost between Form 14A and Heavenly Hymn #379.

How did Rumi phrase it? _ 'You were inside my hand, I kept reaching around for something. I was inside Your hand, but I kept asking questions of those who know very little.' _

Crowley keeps her blasphemy behind her upturned lips, knowing that she will never worship any God but Aziraphale.

-

But the way the seasons pass and pass and pass and are devoured by Time, is a gaping hole that opens in the pit of Crowley’s stomach, and she finds herself falling inside, down and down and down. “Please, sit,” Aziraphale insists, when Crowley turns up on her doorstep in the seventeenth century looking more bedraggled than a demonic rat in the driving rain, “what on earth are you doing here? It’s not that I didn’t miss you terribly, but I thought you’d be gone longer. You just thwarted me last week. What happened to the man with the sheep?” A shock of thunder rattles the door as Aziraphale presses it shut behind her and turns the brass lock.

“Er. Surprise change of plans.” The demon keeps her yellow gaze on the faded velour of her wife's waistcoat. Heavy with rainwater, her russet hair hangs in thick clumps like tangled snakes.

-

Crowley is quiet today and has sauntered into a doorframe on three occasions. “Sorry - new corporation - you know how it goes.”

She doesn’t, actually. “What happened to the old one?”

“Ngh.” Her corporation can’t seem to decide how much muscle memory it has retained. “Nothing important, really. Bodies. They’re fragile things.”

“Just the same as the last one, then?” Aziraphale asks, sizing up Crowley’s form. The angel reaches out a hand to push a lock of hair behind her ear - it’s long now again, longer than it should have grown in barely a few days - and Crowley freezes, inhales an audible hiss, the muscles of her face tightening palpably at the fleeting contact.

Aziraphale recedes slowly, deliberately, keeping her hands visible, familiar with this dance. “Sorry love,” she murmurs, “I’ll make the tea.”

Crowley grabs for her hand as she’s leaving, tight and quick, like catching a vole. “Almost the same,” she mutters, more to the hands than to the angel, noting the familiar crease of the wrist, the soft roadmap of her palm, “but nothing to remind me of you.”

Crowley’s fingernails are digging needy into the back of her hand, dragging her closer, and her grip is ardent enough to make Aziraphale feel that she is being given permission to lean in again.

The demon kisses all sharp teeth and _want _and desperate snake-tongue reaching for her angel with its sixth sense. “You,” she will gasp, later that night, grinding into Aziraphale like a fast-growing vine as she begs Aziraphale’s lips and teeth to mark her shoulders deeper. She will mean, This body belongs only to you.

Underneath, Crowley is thin as Limos with ripples of musculature as palpable as a stone sculpture, one of the older Greek ones where the physiology isn’t quite right. That is what Aziraphale sees: fine art, ancient and irreplicable. The last remains of a statue of Ashtoreth can still take your breath away.

Crowley's corporation will arch back at an inhuman angle, hips thrust forward, breath as haggard as the winds that whip at the windowframes, until finally, at the sparks of light radiating from Aziraphale’s heavenly tongue, she can no longer hold onto the tense place in her that refuses to be rendered powerless. She lets herself fall.

-

As she approaches Aziraphale at her desk in the backroom of the Soho bookshop, the demon makes a show of letting her footsteps fall with drawn-out heaviness and her breathing become audible as she embraces her wife from behind - neither of them responds well to being startled - kissing her neck and draping herself over her shoulders like a snake.

“Tea,” Crowley hisses. “Tea with cream, and biscuits. Scones. With jam. And, er. Those little sandwiches with the crusts cut off.” She begins nibbling at the skin alongside Aziraphale’s collar, trying to think of more things with which to lure Aziraphale away from her paperwork and out to the lavish high tea that she’d already promised her that morning. The angel’s handwriting is absurdly orderly. “Those rocks of sugar on sticks. And I’ll wear the black dress.”

“They’re all black.” Aziraphale moves her stack of documents and reaches up with her left hand to hold her wife’s, their rings clinking together. Crowley has been watching, for quite a while now, mesmerized, the way her linen pants fall across her soft hips, layers of lace and plaid.

“You know.”

She strives to keep writing, but is deflected by the pleasant weight of the demon's body pressing against her shoulders and whatever Crowley is doing with her tongue against the edge of her left ear. “I’ve been tempted,” Aziraphale offers an exaggerated sigh. “But I thought you had work as well. Didn’t you have to - teach witchcraft to a milkmaid or something?”

“It was a nun training. It’s the nineties, angel. They have machines to milk the cows. They teach themselves witchcraft on the internet.”

“Should I be jealous?”

“Of Satanic nuns? Absolutely not.” Crowley detangles herself from her wife and sets about miracling up the promised garment and very slowly and consciously undressing. “Worried, maybe. They’re setting up for Armageddon. They’ve got an itinerary now and everything.”

“Magnificent,” Aziraphale says, and Crowley takes a long second to realize that the angel means _her _and not the ending of the world.

-

Crowley is never entirely sure where her snake ends and her human begins.

One long, grey morning, in 862 A.D., Aziraphale finds her wife swimming in the icy sea, bottom half watersnake and top half nude woman, eyes fully yellow, drifting in the choppy waters as though they were clouds, warming the frigid saltwater around her into a little cocoon of hellfire. “No, don’t stop!” Aziraphale exclaims. “You look like a mermaid.”

A mermaid in the very old stories, at least, the ones where mermaids had barbed teeth to devour men.

This isn’t an attribute you’d expect in a land serpent.

The truth is: Crowley's body finds it easier to be a watersnake than a human. Crowley could probably more easily take on the form of a crocodile or an eel than a human, but Aziraphale was made to look and feel (and most importantly love) like a human, and Crowley can't imagine a world where she wouldn't take on the corporeal form that allows her to be closest to Aziraphale. Bodies have some leeway if you have some imagination.

The truth is: the water makes some of the constant achings, the stinging rims of pain around her hips and wing bones, recede for a few blissful moments. Floating is easier than flying. Sometimes, she flutters across the surface of the water at night, and the stars above are a trillion candles standing vigil to her form, and floating under the stars in the midnight darkness is like flying once was and could have been.

-

Crowley’s turkey-vulture wings are a blend of black and a smudgy grey-brown that intrinsically appears a little bedraggled-looking, even when immaculately preened.

It took her a while to get the hang of flying. You catch the wind differently.

It's not impossible.

The difference is: God _meant _for vultures to fly.

-

Crowley fidgets in listless, serpentine movements, fingers jammed so hard against the pressure-points between her taut wingbones and shoulderblades that if her wings existed on this plane she would likely dislocate one. The demon drags at her own hair to draw her neck back at the proper angle; leaning into the sharpness of the pain seems to release some tension.

By tomorrow, the demon will shine bright as Venus, bedecked in gems, and she will theatrically take the hand of the high priest and meet Aziraphale’s eyes through the crowd, saying, _ This is for you, _ before they go to fuck a good harvest into being. But the demon looks, in this moment, so breathtakingly _human_, Aziraphale thinks, spine slumping forward at a jaunty angle. “May I?” asks the angel, already miracling away the clay dust still clinging in the crevices of her hands.

Crowley nods.

Aziraphale’s hands kneading into her shoulders, are firm and purposeful against knots of pain, the same sort of businesslike reverence with which she carves her wife’s pagan mythology into tablets. They will have their own ritual, once the human theatrics are through.

Crowley is every character in her own mythos, Aziraphale thinks: she’s the morning star falling into the darkness and the irreverent husband on his throne. And of course, the bit at the end: two innocent people must pay the price, and the seasons turn. Aziraphale knows that Love is a gift from the Almighty, and therefore _ not _ to love Crowley would be to toss away the greatest of godly gifts, and therefore it would be _ wrong _ to stop Crowley from worshiping false idols when in doing so she shines as luminous as though she _ were _the Queen of Heaven herself and makes Aziraphale’s chest blossom with celestial passion.

If you stand before the bull-hide altar of Ashtoreth in the middle of the day, you don’t see the morning star rise or set: only ragged white clouds and clear sunshine filling the empty place between the stones.

-

Sometime in the sixteenth century, Crowley slithers from the waters of a secluded Scottish loch and reclines her scaly body in the sun on a rock to warm her freezing blood.

It starts a community legend and a subsequent tourist trap. They claim she returns. She never does, not once.

Sometimes Crowley submits falsified photographs to the newspapers to keep the story alive. The images are just authentic enough that they can’t be disproven. Blurry enough to make you wonder.

-

That’s the easiest way to do it, the temptation: you put the impossible question, you plant the seed, and decades later, it still eats at them, even when they can’t remember what the question was.

-

Aziraphale has dreams where her wife is swimming, swimming, swimming like a monstrosity from a human's nightmare, but in Aziraphale's psyche, it's the most awe-inspiring sight she’s ever beheld. Crowley's sea-snake tail flexes like a twist of rope in the slanted light, her red hair waving in the saltwater like dulse made of flame. The surface of the pool glows iridescent.

Then the lake turns to squid-ink, darker than the deep nights before the humans made their electrical lights, darker than the spaces between the stars, and her heart feels Crowley screaming, but in her dream, there is no sound.

_ Quiet, the ways of the Underworld are perfect, _says a steely voice that might be the Almighty, or maybe that simply awful queen for whom Aziraphale had been commanded to do miracles in the fourteenth century.

The whole pool is consumed by absolute darkness.

Aziraphale wakes, but cannot roll over because Crowley is embracing her too tightly in her sleep, thin arms trapping her in place with their vicelike strength. So she remains there, feeling Crowley's breath flutter against the back of her neck. Crowley hadn't bothered breathing in her sleep until sometime around 2000 B.C., at Aziraphale's bequest: even though she knew it to be biologically irrelevant, the sight of her demon's unbreathing inanimate corporation was too much for the angel’s nerves.

The angel revels in the familiar pressure of Crowley’s forehead against pressed into Aziraphale’s hair, the demon's leg wrapped around her own, tense even in slumber - in the _ realness _of it all. For now, they are together, and the ripples of love from the angel’s heart make flowers bloom unbidden for miles around, and there will be a good harvest.

-

Crowley and Aziraphale dislike the official social gatherings at which they are, for their respective occupations, expected to interact with various targets of demonic or angelic intervention: Aziraphale because she can’t imagine why anyone would want to take something as enjoyable as a meal and make it such horrible drudgery, and Crowley because the formal speeches are so _ dull _ that she’s tempted to dramatically shed her snakeskin and slither out the window just to bring a moment of excitement to these humans’ monotonous existence. She refrains, because either Heaven or Hell is supposed to influence the city planning documents in the hands of the human across the table, and Aziraphale had insisted it would be _academically intriguing _to see which of their perspectives he should choose. The answer seems to be his own.

Crowley has grown used to the custom of certain human men, of simultaneously praising a woman for being more intelligent than he is, while hinting that she must cease being so intelligent because it makes him nervous. No one addresses Aziraphale in that manner; Crowley has no patience for it. What she’s just done to the man’s house while he was lecturing everyone in the surrounding seats about the inadequacy of her wife’s suggestions, is a little unfair to the rats. She will have to reward them well for it.

The grandfather clock chimes. The wine is poured. The chatter grows louder. Aziraphale appears to have psychically retreated to the novel she’d been reading earlier that day. Periodically, she says _of course _or _yes, yes, _ and Crowley can practically _hear _her trying to find loopholes in the regulations on angelic intervention and free will. Her blithe smile has taken on a certain slackness, and her gentle hand against the demon’s knee under the table, jitters a rhythm that must go along with an antsy melody in her head.

This particular decade has brought fantastically frilly layers of skirts, the sort that you can lose your hand inside and no one can see where it’s gone.

Crowley feigns to knock a tea spoon lightly to the ground, lithely bending in one snakelike action to retrieve the fallen implement and slide her hand up the inside of Aziraphale’s thigh as she does so.

“One might almost say you don’t take the situation clearly, Miss Crowley,” the angel chides blandly, leaning willingly into her touch, the corner of her mouth tightening and twitching upward.

The human man flashes her wife a conspiratorial grin that makes Crowley’s blood turn to hellfire. Crowley tries to remember what the situation was. She compromises by helping Aziraphale forget.

As the polite chatter and clink of porcelain grow louder, the demon creeps her long fingers up past the top of Aziraphale’s stockings to rest against the junction of her thighs. She holds her hand still for an impossibly long second, waiting, tempting, appreciating the slight quiver of the angel’s hips.

Aziraphale is sure that she is meant to be thwarting this, but it seems wrong to thwart something as heavenly as Crowley’s hand flicks lightly against her through her cotton underthings, searching familiar terrain with practised fingers. Crowley begins to stroke her hand in careless circles, mindful to keep her shoulders steady, watching the angel out of the corner of her eye. In their neat bouquets in the center of the table, the cut flowers stand at once straighter and radiant. Somewhere down the long table, someone exclaims that perhaps it shan't rain this afternoon after all, and someone else wonders aloud how the ivy could possibly have already grown over the windows.

Aziraphale sits primly in her seat, squirming in small motions that match her calm smile, looking everywhere but Crowley. Light radiates from the pressure of her finger through the angel's core, her hand now flighty as the wings of a moth. The surrounding vineyards will have a particularly good year, and Crowley will keep a bottle of wine stored away for no other reason than to casually suggest they _ try the 1795_, because she delights in Aziraphale’s blushing protests of - _ you know I didn’t _ mean _ to, those vines must have been very _ receptive_, that’s all. _

The human is saying something about something. The chatter and clang of porcelain fills the corners of the room. The clock chimes again.

-

The human will propose to Aziraphale at the end of the gathering. “You had a dreamy look in your eyes,” he will say, imagining that it was intended for him.

The angel is not unaccustomed to having this effect on men, but denies him just bashfully enough that she knows she will get her hand in those city planning documents all the same.

Aziraphale will corner her wife later, at a bench in the near-abandoned garden, concealed between red brick and the early-spring rosebushes. “You wretch,” she will moan, pressing her body against the demon's, laughing and giddy and furious at once, her tone set aflame.

“What on earth are you on about?” Crowley asks, taking the angel’s face in her hands and studying it with a crooked smile. “You brought him over to the Light of Heaven. Heaven scored a victory over Hell. You’ve had your cake and eaten it too.” 

“I have_ not _” she whines pointedly, thorny branches trembling in awe of the silvery angelic _desire _in her tone.

-

Caught between the scratch of rose thorns and granite bench, somehow, Aziraphale is flying. Crowley flicks her tongue up toward the angel’s sex, admiring the dimples in her strong legs, snake-sense tasting _love _as clearly as she tastes the ethereal wetness already sliding down the apex of her thighs. Aziraphale’s fingernails make blunted crescent moons in the demon’s forearm as she flickers her forked tongue back and forth across the angel’s clit. The branches of the rosebush above them are cascading into pastel blooms, but for the lightning in Aziraphale’s eyes, it could be aflame.

The angel croons her wife's name, hardly remembering to muffle her voice, with such love in her tone that the Earth itself can’t help but sing it back at her.

Crowley thinks: Aziraphale isn't Eve, in this situation. Aziraphale is the Tree.

-

Aziraphale knows, all too well, that she will always be read as the nice one. There’s an art to playing the childish-innocence card for personal gain, to freeze all wobbly and adorable and wide-eyed as a baby deer in headlights and make the humans feel absolutely terrible about hurting her before they’ve ever tried. You acknowledge, at some point, that in no world will you ever be taken seriously, and you lean into it. It becomes a quiet weapon.

When the men who had been threatening her bookshop return from their vehicles in a few moments to demand why and how she had done _ that_, she will offer an innocent, bewildered smile and say, "A weasel? Are you quite sure? Oh, Crowley darling, come hear this, you'll never _ believe _ what someone's gone and done to this poor man's car.”

-

Crowley is smoking with her head thrown back, gazing up at the canopy of apple and oak with unblinking yellow eyes, the stars scattered glittering beyond. The Bentley is parked some distance away, at the edge of the meadow.

“The thing about Heaven, is they're the experts.” Aziraphale fidgets with the edge of the blue tartan blanket, curled on her side in the comforting gap between her wife and the picnic-basket, “When they tell you that something isn’t Bad, you've got to believe that they know what they’re talking about.” Today she is wearing something absurdly cosy, knitted legwarmers and a beige sweater with stretched-out sleeves, her bowtie buried under a woollen scarf. She’s a cloud of light in the watery autumn sun, and Crowley is floating.

Why must it be that every time the angel takes out a thermos - no matter its contents, no matter how much time should pass - and hands it to Crowley, still her hands insist on quivering?

Crowley exhales sharply, but seems to find nothing amiss about being the one to unscrew the lid and pour their Irish coffee into two mugs, heating them lightly with a wisp of hellfire from her bony hands. “You could be bleeding out and Heaven would say you weren’t even injured, if it suited them.” Crowley would take Hell over Heaven, any day; Hell has fire and brimstone and endless torment, but Heaven is _disappointed in you _and doesn’t care for an explanation. Aziraphale tries so hard to be Good - in every matter aside from her wife, at least - and wrath on her behalf writhes furious Crowley’s abdomen.

-

The demon likes to believe that she descended into the underworld of her own intent. It’s easier than the messy truth. And it quiets the scream in her, the rage that burns blinding as the eyes of Medusa’s hair. Yeah, I walked out, that's it. I’d had enough.

-

“...when you come back from your library meeting, page 37, the one where…” the demon is saying. Aziraphale has proposed an academic experiment which involves a book of ancient Sumerian mythology and a book of human sexual positions.

“Yes!”

“But what are you up to today.”

“No time.” She plants a quick kiss in her hair. “It’s a publishing company - you’d like it. And then, er. Busy day, really. Might not be back til tomorrow, uh, or next week, or so. What about with page 43?” Crowley darts for the door, heavy combat boots wholly silent against the worn floorboards.

The Bentley is parked in front of a fire hydrant, but the ticket on the windshield combusts at her approach. The inside of the car would be unbearably hot for a human, but her snake blood finds it pleasant to be trapped beneath its sun-heated metal walls. Crowley flicks her hand at the speakers.

_ There’s no time for us, _ sings Bach’s “Who Wants To Live Forever,” _ there’s no place for us. _

Crowley rests her head against the steering wheel.

-

Here is all Crowley knows for sure: giving herself to Aziraphale is the only kind of _giving herself _that does not make the world rise like a devouring sea. She feels herself levitating in the joy of it, asymmetrical wingbones squirming against the cushions, hips already arcing toward the angel’s willing lips.

Aziraphale thinks: Crowley _throws _herself into sex as though she’s casting herself into the abyss.

-

“It’s not the worship,” Aziraphale says, narrow candle-flame digging long shadows into her round face, linen nightgown clinging loosely to the curve of her hips, “it’s the darkness. That’s what’s frightening you. That’s what makes you so… amorous.”

Crowley blinks incredulously. Reddish lashes make a tinge of flame across bitingly yellow irises.

“That’s what human bodies do,” the angel continues. “I must be honest, I don’t entirely understand it. It’s something to do with memory in muscles, I think? Human nervous systems are entirely a mess. But that is how you are: you want to be tied up and left in the dark because you’re frightened and therefore _turned on_, as they say. Oh, my dear girl. It’s a perfectly normal reaction to have.”

Crowley wants to protest, but Aziraphale is giving her the opening, _ is _opening the vulnerable space and holding the door. "Go on," she says, uneasy. "You want to tie me up again, is that it?" And she wishes at once that she could have said something gentler, because of the blessed _earnestness _ in Aziraphale’s eyes. “You should. And open the window. And take the candle. And leave me here,” she says, “and leave me here until _ you _can stand it no more.”

-

“I will always come back,” Crowley says in 2056 B.C, after the third time she’s been discorperated, this one an ill-fated mishap involving a foreign diplomat, an irate archangel, and a particularly bad-tempered camel.

Rain patters and kicks at the roof of the tent like a drum. There’s an ominous presence rolling the drums in the thunder tonight, unless it’s the flock of ducks who were outside the door earlier. The wet woodsmoke hangs thick in their humanoid lungs, tasting faintly of mugwort. It’s the first rain this area has seen in years.

There's a certain fear of rain, in these years after the Flood.

Every fear has its equal and opposite.

It feels terribly selfish that the demon must be the one to comfort _ her_, so Aziraphale must nod.

-

“It’sss you,” hissses Crowley, as the angel binds her hands with the laces of her corset in drawn-out, methodical, impossibly tender movements. The angle holds her whole body open like a wound. “You’re the one who’s _ frightened_. Try getting halfway down the hall without making the flowerss wither for miles around.” The draft from the open window is ice against her snakeskin.

Aziraphale's linen shift falls shapeless and free beneath her knees, rumpled, the long braid down her back is tousled. She keeps meeting Crowley’s eyes with her own, wide as saucers and ever-so-serious.

“_Quiet_,” the angel scolds, and then: “I will stay within earshot.” The brass candleholder is heavy in Aziraphale’s hand. Her dreams play across her waking eyes in the surreal glow of the candlelight: Crowley swallowed into the underworld like squid-ink. The demon’s body is tall and fluid as a string of beads, her too-many ribs bejewelled with areas of red snakeskin.

As the angel walks down the hall, the wintery London day turns from a smattering of sleet and icy rain, into the deepest blizzard the city has seen in decades. She sets down her candle and opens a book.


	2. II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> written on two sleepless nights, many months apart. many thanks to everyone who left comments and kudos on the previous chapter. this is 0% of what the original was supposed to be because i had all these ideas about sumerian mythology and then crowley had a panic attack and didn't want to go along with it. whoops.

“You look – absolutely _stunning_.” Crowley steps back to admire her own corporation from within Aziraphale’s, some hours after the Apocalypse fails to occur. Within her wife’s form she is floating, as though if she leapt into the air she would land on clouds.

“Narcissist,” says Aziraphale fondly, thinking she must do something to her own body’s tangled post-Armageddon curls before her demon shows up in Heaven with her blond hair stuck up into devil horns and gives away their ruse. She reaches out with Crowley’s fingers to adjust her crooked collar, feeling her wife’s heart fluttering inside her chest as her fingers brush her own throat.

Crowley’s corporation is an absolute _devil _to stand upright in. No wonder she’d thought nothing of speeding through a quaint English village in a burning vehicle, flames leaping through the air: that was her body’s ordinary state of existence.

“Oh, please. You’re the hottest demon ever led to execution in Hell. But someone’s going to notice if you keep glowing with golden light like that.” Though Crowley’s arms are poised for her wife to lean on, she’s determinedly flitting about like a redheaded snake-eyed butterfly, pacing circles around the flat and flapping the demon’s thin hands as she repeatedly reviews the details of their plan. There was no changing the angel’s mind on this: _Trust me_, she’d said, and you could _see _centuries of wilted flowers all standing sharp as so many flaming swords.

Aziraphale stills for a moment, blushing faintly grey as demon-blood rushes to her cheeks in Crowley’s body. The unnatural celestial radiance fades from around her infernal frame. She clutches at the wall, adjusting to her wife’s unsteady corporation.

Crowley leans forward and ruffles her short hair with one of Aziraphale’s hands.

-

Crowley loves nothing more than to humour her angel’s odd whims, and Aziraphale needs to feel in control for once; everybody’s garden needs Aziraphale to feel in control for once. She is letting herself be tied to this eighteenth-century bedpost _for Aziraphale_ who outshines Heaven, Aziraphale who is going to reward her – she quivers – and if this is the game that her angel wants to play, Crowley can pretend to be afraid of the dark – which she isn’t – can pretend to be bothered by the horrific vulnerability of being tied at such an angle, which –

There it is: floodlights of vulnerability when it registers that shielding yourself with your arms is no longer an option. Though they’ve been married for millennia, barring one inebriated night in second-century Rome, the demon does not relinquish this sort of control – even to pretend, even when it sets her body on edge with an awesome and terrible fire. Crowley takes for granted that she trusts her wife for anything, that she would give her anything, everything. So why should there be such a _fighting _through her body?

Aziraphale notes it: a quiver in her shoulders.

She steps back to examine her work, eyes flicking from the cords laced in a careful crisscross at her wrists, fastened above the head of the bed, and her deliciously exposed torso. It vexes her that Crowley should appear almost _afraid _of her, but – oh, steady her angelic heart – for tonight, Crowley is all _hers_. She rearranges Crowley’s unresisting legs against the bed as she gathers up a heap of pillows to make sure she's comfortable, feeling her own hands tense and contract like nervous heartbeats. There’s an instant when Crowley’s knee flinches and tenses so stiff beneath her touch that she nearly loses her resolve, redoubles it. “There, there. You’re being so _good _for me,” she praises, letting her hands linger against her forearms as she tosses a miracle around the knots there to make them more comfortable.

The instinct to kick her wife's hand away with her untied feet is as abhorrent as it is strong, and Crowley digs her heels into the pillows, resisting. She smells the musky, smoke-stained wallpaper, the faint scent of violets and jasmine that lingers where Aziraphale’s been doing miracles. The rainstorm plays a panpipe against the windows. In the distance, the cold wintery clatter of business shoes on half-frozen puddles in London sidewalks meets the occasional nighttime scuffle of cart wheels on sleet. This isn’t Hell.

The cords are miracled impossibly soft so that she’s only aware of a vague tug on her arms and her own inability to fight; if anything, they’re holding in place the one wrists that forever dislocates. This isn’t Hell.

Crowley has always been the one deciding _what now_. She isn’t prepared for the way that something tense falls away, something like a vice of anxiety where her halo used to be. Her vision fuzzes around the edges in a way that isn’t unpleasant, a new feeling: Aziraphale is a snake-charmer and all that matters is the movement of her hands.

-

Aziraphale imagines Crowley’s laughter if she knew her wife had tied her naked to the wall and gone into the next room to read a book – the teasing smile that dimples her cheeks for a moment before the return of her customary scowl. She pictures Crowley, splayed like a painting of a martyr: take the ropes away and you’d think her a mural of an angel in full glory. Squint at the constellations of scar-tissue and snake-scales and you’d think her the pagan goddesses from her own legends, the divine personification of a whole night sky. Most importantly, she’s right _there_, in all her naked beauty, waiting for Aziraphale, and _(deep breath)_ Hell isn’t going to steal her away for tonight.

Aziraphale’s celestial heart is a million butterflies in a net. She knows without opening the curtains, that brown leaves of oak and elm have fallen at once in a sudden necrotic autumn. Dandelions in the cobblestones fold in half on dying stalks. She's seen it before.

Aziraphale turns to the old stories – not the biblical ones, but the myths that her wife had invented like a prophet of some better world that could never have existed, the Word incarnated into something else entirely, the first blasphemous chapter of their Arrangement. You had to transcribe her sandcastle-words quickly before the tide came in on rolling waves of alcohol and sleep.

-

And in that moment, Crowley is the great library of Alexandria just before it went up. A see-saw between fear and poiesis. Charades, four letters, sounds like: your mind collapsing in on itself like the sides of a sinkhole.

-

On their wedding night, the moon is still barely a century old and the grasses of the new Earth grow lush and green beyond the fluttering walls of the tent. Aziraphale with one knee on either side of Crowley’s boney hips, leans down, pulls Crowley closer, clothing half-undone. Fire- and moonlight catch greyish scars in familiar celestial patterns, spangled across the demon’s abdomen. “My dear,” she whispers, awed, letting her fingertips hover on Alpha Carinae, “you’re a whole night sky!” 

“Cloudy night, maybe,” Crowley mutters, turning her face to the side, the surreal joy of the day lost for a moment because this is the bit she was dreading – doesn’t the angel know that this is something twisted and vile, burned into her, a reminder of something torn out of her, of heavenly light that she was not permitted to keep?

But Aziraphale is tracing a finger from star to star, making constellations with her fingertips, her touch so tender that it could almost turn them to gold again. She leans down, plants a kiss to the star at the edge of her breast, and then another, burying her face between them. “Did you _make_ all of these, darling?” she asks, her voice vibrating softly through Crowley's chest, muffled into her skin, loose strands of her golden hair brushing the demon's lips. Does the angel feel like she’s walking on starlight because of this map of constellations, or because she’s finally met someone who _loves _more than Heaven had taught her was possible?

“Uh, helped. Used to help my boss out with... you know, _light_. He used to be… very into light.” Aziraphale’s lips, she thinks, are the only force in the world that could make her forget about her place in Satan’s employment.

“Oh, they’re absolutely _lovely_,” sighs Crowley’s – _wife _– as if this day itself weren’t already surreal enough. Is it the mead that makes her brain feel sticky as honey, or the half-nude angel looking at her as though she’s somehow still holy?

-

All that Aziraphale knows of Hell she’s learned from Heaven’s lecture hall or Crowley in those small hours of the night, but it’s enough that she feels a sort of wartime desperation clawing up inside her as she kisses her goodbye too many times.

“Don’t,” the demon hisses, “I’m just checking in at work, don’t make it like…” Her yellow eyes implore, don’t make this harder. Aziraphale has the worse job anyways, Crowley knows. Hell can’t hurt Crowley because she doesn’t respect them.

“Of course,” says Aziraphale, taking her hand and kissing it one final time for good measure, “No worries, dear. I’ll see you so very soon!” The thing about angels and repressed emotions is that they can impact the surrounding matter of the World in unexpected ways. Because as the principality says, _No worries, _her tremorous smile is almost believable, and she holds in all that distress like so many hands grabbing at her throat, and the wildflowers at her feet shrivel up in time with her heart, and the welcome rainclouds evaporate on the desert air.

-

“Nah, I fixed it,” Crowley reassures her, smug and sheepish in equal measure. “My boss thinks I did it on purpose,” she admits. “False idol worship. Do whatever you need to the weather, it’s getting me brownie points in Hell. And all we have to do is,” she waves a hand significantly in the air.

It’s a far better headrush than tempting a shepherd to theft – one night Crowley tosses out a moment of (un)divine ecstasy, then she’s a goddess, then a sacred prostitute, and when civilizations fall, she can do it again. Inana, Ishtar, Astarte. Leave me a tribute, your battle-armour in my temple, burn me an offering, pour me a libation. _Demon _isn’t the sort of job where they _praise _you like that. She’d stop in a heartbeat if her wife voiced an objection, but Aziraphale knows that this is the diabolical equivalent of her own love of theatre.

And so Crowley fucks human priests because she loves the thrill of it, the exaltation of being worshipped, the ecstasy of acting out the mythology from her own imagination. What is Michael doing now, or Gabriel? Filing paperwork? Crowley is making legends. Crowley is the queen of the heavens. Crowley fucks human priests, and she may no longer be an angel, but for tonight she is a fertility goddess incarnate, and she is the one in control.

-

Except that with her wrists bound together above her the bed in Azirphale’s eighteenth-century bookshop, Crowley chokes out her safeword in a hurried gasp, after the hundredth time that she wanted to and didn’t.

Aziraphale immediately backs away a couple careful inches.

“Sorry,” Crowley mutters, of all things.

“My dear. Please don’t be. I’m going to miracle those away now,” Aziraphale tells her, and _that _tone has dissolved like melted butter, leaving only quiet concern, “alright?”

She half-nods. Crowley lets herself slide down into the heap of pillows at the head of the bed, newly-freed wrists held out in a gesture of don’t-touch-me-yet, the devouring wave of panic giving way to a foolish sort of embarrassment. Except that somehow she’s never felt _more_ in control.

-

“Whoa, angel, no need to fret. They’re just bodies,” Crowley soothes, because her wife is clinging to her new sixth-century corporation as teary-eyed as though she’d returned from the dead. Or rather, as though she didn’t return from the dead _all the time_. “Hardly even bodies. Don’t even need food or air.”

A heap of rent plate-armour is still laid in the corner of Aziraphale’s room like a shed snakeskin, the empty shell to hold her previous corporation. Of _course, _her angel would stand guard over the thing like a monument, rather than hide it before they’re found out. If she’d had any control over the matter, the demon would have chosen to discorporate in private, because her wife always makes such an unnecessary fuss. It’s ugly, and then it’s over.

“It’s not just your corporation,” says Aziraphale, “it’s your soul.”

“Haven’t got one.” The smell of cloves and woodsmoke clings to the insides of her new lungs. Thick tapestries embroidered with too many golden lions are hung from the walls to block out the winds. You can feel the whole fortress crackling under the weight of the sudden rain after the drought.

“Oh, you know what I mean. Your spirit. Your essence. The thing that’s left over when you get yourself discorporated in a garden-variety human jousting tournament.”

“He wasss a wizard,” Crowley hisses defensively into her shoulder. “Not garden variety.”

“And I _worry_, when I see you tossing your _just-body_” – Aziraphale relaxes her grip enough to plant a kiss at the juncture of Crowley’s neck and shoulder, her new skin still smelling faintly of whatever sulfuric recorporation department of Hell it was conjured in – “into such ridiculous situations, as though things aren’t hard enough for you already, because” – she kisses farther up her neck as Crowley leans into the contact – “it can’t be healthy for your awful, soulless demon-spirit to be so _torn up _all the time.” Their hands come to rest on one another’s shoulders.

Crowley thinks privately that it’s less healthy for the local villagers, scrounging the last handfuls of barley from the grain-mill floor, pointing angry fingers at local witches while the soil cracks into dust and dry leaves make carpets in the empty riverbeds.

-

Aziraphale underestimates her influence on the environment, Crowley thinks. If her wife were Fallen, the birds would not bother to sing, and the trees would decay, and the humans would die off, and the Earth would be another Venus as viewed from some other planet. If a world could exist with no overhead supervision, no secret meetings and fleeting nights, where they could live together fearlessly forever and eternity, maybe the Earth would grow so lush and verdant that they’d all be in a Garden again.

Aziraphale's smile is a sunbeam, and you can feel the whole garden grow greener with it. When Aziraphale saddens, you see it across every begonia in the Dowlings’ flowerbeds, and when she brightens again, so does the sky. Aziraphale is uneasy, and so are the sparrows on the telephone-lines.

“I’m tossing one report on a desk, and seeing a guy about a hellbeast. I’ll be back in two hours tops. No need to swoon dramatically against the couch. Oh, here,” Crowley snatches up a small African violet in a plastic pot and holds it out. “Why don’t you keep this on your desk while I’m gone, and just… think nice angel thoughts at it.”

-

The meeting drags on, a dull white noise drilling through her skull. One wrong word and it can slip away so sharply. This must be how an ant feels, crawling around the side of a woodchipper. _Yes, the antichrist is evil. No, he’s not setting fire with his eyes yet, but he’s only three, everybody knows that antichrists don’t start that until at least six… he sure screams like a Great Beast..._

There’s a smattering of unimpressed, vaguely sardonic clapping.

“Oh, and Crowley?” Ligur’s arms are crossed. Ligur’s _chameleon’s _arms are crossed.

Her blood turns to antimatter.

“Excellent work with the elections.”

“Yeah, right. No problem. My pleasure. Uh, evil pleasure. Your Disgrace.”

-

Crowley returns in an hour and fifty-three minutes, lurking outside the murky bookshop window to watch her wife engaged in a staring contest with the African violet, which is blooming on and on in never-ending panic. Another tough, hairy blossom in too many shades of mauve and violet tears its way from the plant again and again. The angel wrings her hands in her lap.

The demon snaps her fingers and the bookshop door allows her entry. Her ears ring with the velvety stillness of old-bookshop after city streets and hell-hallways that push against you from all sides. “See, angel? Nothing to worry about,” she proclaims by way of greeting, slithering up to her angel and waving the door closed, before perching on the edge of the desk and leaning down to graze a kiss at the corner of her mouth.

Their fingers inch together and interlock against the polished wood as Crowley slouches back against a stack of books, using her hands to hold her upright.

“Oh, angel. You’ve undone yourself.” She admires the flower with forced optimism as though she hadn’t noticed it before, because the dozens of otherworldly clusters of many-hued blooms weighing on the houseplant’s stems resemble a botanical anxiety attack. Crowley decides, once and for all: the world _can’t_ end because she _is _going to find a time and place where she and Aziraphale can live and never part.

-

The demon’s flat sets an underworldly backdrop, a romanization of Hell: spotless grey walls are the faces of sheer underground cliffs, asphodel blooming in deep plastic pots. Candles have been swapped for dim electrical lights, the sort meant for snakes living in a glass zoo. The hook on the bedroom wall is a regular ornament by the twentieth century, ropes dangling shamelessly. And so is Crowley’s obedient place before it, docile, letting Aziraphale undress her with silken hands and centuries of practice.

“Hold _still_,” the angel chides, an edge in her tone, as she fumbles with a clasp at the side of her dress and Crowley wriggles at the tiny catch of metal. The demon is still dressed for her latest temptation: clothing in this decade seems to involve quite a lot of silk and sequins, not to mention the sort of diamond-laden necklace that would have cost more than the bookshop if it weren’t miracled. 

Aziraphale is poetic where Hell gets-this-over-with; Aziraphale knows what raises the right _anticipationfearterror_ and what sends her psyche reeling. Aziraphale removes her clothing so tenderly that she is glad that snake-eyes don’t cry, where Hell would do it with a snap. The angel lifts her unresisting arms, one at a time, to slide them free of the straps of her dress, exposing her pale, braless figure underneath. Silk pools at her feet before it is miracled away.

Her own nudity somehow makes the room feel larger, the inches of space between herself and Aziraphale twice as wide.

Crowley’s breath catches in her throat at the wildly stimulating brush of Aziraphale’s soft hand against the back of her neck as she undoes the clasp with a metallic snap. The metal chain slithers across her collarbone like a snake, heavy diamonds a handful of stars clinking together in Aziraphale’s hand. It leaves an odd floating lightness in its wake.

The angel sets the jewellery down with a long, deliberate motion. She brushes the lightest of touches down her neck and along her clavicle where the gems had been. Her fingertip paints a story that trails past old cosmic worksites, her fingers see the stars there: the puckered white mess of the milky way across the corner of her protruding collarbone. “Give me your hands, darling,” Aziraphale commands sternly.

Crowley holds them out, tense with something like what the humans feel when their limbs know that demons lurk beyond the bed at night, juxtaposed against a trembling, delighted longing: _take my fingers in your mouth, let me put them all over you, command me, touch me again, don’t touch me…_ She breathes into the moment, noting the clench of tension and fear and passion expanding and contracting in her own abdomen like hot coals in the wind.

Aziraphale flips her hands over, bends down, and brings her lips to the palm of each hand, brushing a kiss there, enchanted by the sight of Crowley’s mounting anticipation manifesting in so many unhidden snake scales spilling down her arm and across her wrist.

Crowley flinches despite herself as her body aches to return the gesture. But she’s powerless to pull away, at one with the movement of Aziraphale’s hand even before she begins to spool the rope around her wrists. 

Heaven is going to wonder where the principality learned to tie such perfect knots, she thinks, as Aziraphale finishes binding her wrists, winding up the rope and knotting it once in the middle, sliding her fingers underneath to check its tightness. She uses the knotted rope to guide the demon’s arms above her head, forearms framing her ears, levitating a few feet into the air to fasten the last knot in place and give the illusion that the taller demon is hanging from the wall, though they both know she’s now lying on the wall with no more discomfort than if it were the floor.

-

Crowley had talked her wife into striking her exactly once in 1879; the angel had described it as the most atrocious experience she could imagine and refused to believe it was worth whatever demonic pleasure Crowley drew from it, though she said _demonic _as lovingly as ever. All the pleading and goading in the world won’t make Aziraphale raise a hand to her. Instead, the single white feather in Aziraphale’s hand gleams with faint heavenly light as it dances to the sensitive spot at her neck and Crowley screws up her face against it.

“I am here to pass judgement on you. You've been a very _good _demon, haven't you? Only yesterday” – Aziraphale can sense the way all that laughter builds up inside her as she struggles to obey the command to stay still, laced with the laughter that tingles against her angelic senses – “I saw you miracle a superglued coin _off _of the sidewalk for a child, _right_ in front of the office door – ”

Her skin laughs with fireworks at the teasing flick of it, too slow, tracing her collarbone and down her sides. Crowley hisses between her clenched teeth, pushing her body more heavily against the wall to keep from thrashing. “Make him grow up into a greedy thief – ”

“I am not accepting _excuses_. The _disregard _for your own safety. And after you _promised_ to take care of yourself, I don't think you were sober for one single _moment _that I was away.”

Crowley longs for sharpness. Her skin expects metal, alights with surprise at eerily soft plumage, making her corporation spasm at odd angles against the wall. Too soft. Why does it feel better to picture a knife? Hadn’t she slept for so long so as _not _to picture –

“Pay _attention,_” Aziraphale scolds, flicking the feather, weaponlike, back to the sensitive spot in the hollow beneath her ribs.

Caught for a second off-guard by the sudden stimulation of the nerves there, Crowley flinches as though it were a weapon, swallows, and then gives herself over to the touch, golden and holy against her skin. How can someone be so _soft _and render Crowley so powerless with a _tickle_. But it hurts just enough, and Crowley relishes in the edge of pain: her spine thrashing against the cold wall, the pull of her shoulders against her bonds. This isn't God’s curse on her skeleton tonight; this is an awe-inspiring raw force that she leans into, glad that it’s almost too much.

Crowley’s eyes flick from Aziraphale’s hand to her solemn pink lips, asking, _what next_. Aziraphale’s _hand_, clutching the feather as dainty as though it were the handle of a teacup, making new lines, ones that Crowley cannot see but can only feel. “You forgot to…”

“Hush.” Though her voice remains strict, her eyes flash with mirth under her centuries-old theatre training. “_I'll_ decide what you need.” The angel’s knuckles tighten as she fights to steady her own lungs. But that tiny moment when she breaks character: Crowley worships that as well, mesmerized by the smile-lines dancing around the corners of her angel's face, the squirm of her shoulders as she fights to remain composed. The angel’s feather attacks the sensitive spot beneath her hip, and she feels her legs lash out almost of their own accord.

“_Darling_,” she scolds with a theatrical edge of disappointment, “I _told _you not to move until _I _say so. If you kick one more time, I'll have to tie your ankles, too. Understood?”

“Yes, master.”

“Say it again.”

“Yes, master.”

It shouldn’t feel so good, such a promise:_ because Hell is not your master, I am_.

-

“A very good demon.” Pleading cracks her voice. “Too good. You should – punish me again. _Please_, master,” She would never _beg_ like this in Hell. How blissful to beg without genuine fear. There’s a fire rising in her like a match set to oil. Get out the _blessed_ feather again at least, she thinks, quivering in expectation, not the empty void of whatever comes next.

“Now, now,” Aziraphale scolds, running a hand along the side of her jaw, tilting her to face her without meeting her eyes, her grip firm, “I see what you’re doing. You want me to punish you so that I’ll stay with you, don’t you, dearest?”

Aziraphale always has to be right about those sorts of things. “I will always come back, darling,” Aziraphale assures her firmly, “I will always come back for you, but I need you to _trust me_.” She places a few teasing kisses on the demon’s belly, but she’s already backing up a few excruciating inches, _no _–

The angel dances a hand against her thin hips, pauses to skirt teasing fingers across the insides of her thighs, her carefully-manicured sharp nails, smooth as glass. Her hand retreats.

Crowley lets the scratch of a whimper leave her throat. “My – _God_, angel, you can’t – ”

“Shhh.” The angel stands on tiptoes to kiss her once, hard, teeth clacking against her own, and the retreats just as quickly. “None of that. I _can_, and I have to, dear. You know that.”

And then Aziraphale withdraws like the moon behind the hills, miracling away the last of the lights. She’s gone with the click of a door. Crowley can see enough in the dark, but hills are _different _in the dark, and being tied up gives the darkness invisible teeth. Her body is a tingling map of stars in the last places Aziraphale touched her, sparkling cosmic in her skin: palms, wrist, belly, thigh.

-

Crowley is a map of Hell: joints with an invisible crookedness, an immaterial not-rightness, years of miracles bracing her body together like a repeatedly re-set bone. There’s a war ever-firing into her skeleton. Crowley is always on edge, ready to bite (sometimes metaphorically). When she tires, her eyes only widen. Crowley is an anomaly too sacred to name. Crowley was wasted on Heaven; she's got too much talent. She doesn't have Grace, but she has _swagger_. Aziraphale wonders whether even after eternity she could _not _be mesmerized by the way her wife walks, everything a full-body motion, caught between an absurd snakelike abdominal strength that keeps her upright and an impossible arrangement of bones. And from the angle she approaches their meeting-point, the sun is setting with a colour that makes her fiery hair seem to smudge on forever through the sky.

“I wish you’d told me you were in trouble,” Aziraphale frets, embracing her wife as they sink together to the ground beneath the bristly desert flora that put forth new leaves upon impact. She twirls a handful of Crowley's braids in her like loose rope in her hand, discreetly checking for injuries. Ordinarily, her faint smell of evil is reassuring, but not _this _sort of evil.

Crowley snorts; it turns into a hiss. “You’d only have worried.” When a human does a good deed and is gruesomely tortured for it, they're a saint, but when Crowley saves a child from a fire and gets three years in the Fifth Circle for it, she's _disobedient _and _asking for it_ and _hopefully learned her lesson._ Her throat scratches dry and she scrambles for air, coughing up dry words. “Just helped a human with a thing.”

She grabs at Aziraphale’s wrists, holds on to them. “I will _never _tell them about you,” she says. “No one will ever come after _you_, alright?”

Aziraphale can’t come any closer with her wrists pinned in Crowley’s tight fingers. She bends down and plants a kiss on the knuckles of one hand. She wants to say: _I worried for you so much that I forgot to worry for me. _Her words are caught in her chest.

-

The angel doesn’t do good with sudden carpets wrenched from beneath her feet, with maybe-probably-soon. She needs to leave the room and not feel that Crowley is being torn away like half of her heart from her chest. She needs tangible, needs Crowley with her snake-eye deep with yearning, tied up _right there, right now. _Aziraphale, seated amid her wife’s plants, runs a finger slowly, thoughtlessly around the edge of each bloom of the African violet, tracing the ridge of each blossom.

-

Crowley feels her vision tunnel as her feet step off of the elevator, and it’s all spotty from there. Heavy layers of wire obstruct the windows, and heavy stone walls block you from the heat of the hellfire pits beyond, and the person at the desk will take far too long to drag up your paperwork, and stamp you off. There’s another desk, and then another, and an escort of lower demons with maces at their hips, fencing you in, making sure you don’t change your mind about coming quietly, and more demons to make you sign off that you’ve reported and that you understand your punishment, et cetera.

“Can’t see why all this is necessary,” says Crowley. The air is dense as subway smog, settling in her pores. The fluorescent lights make even her bones feel naked. It’s the anticipation, she thinks. They know how it gets to you. The paperwork building suspense like bees in your belly.

“You know the drill. Wings out,” says the demon in charge, blood dripping from their eyes, sounding bored as they toss a hastily filed Routine Torment Form on top of a disorganized mess of filing folders. The other demon isn’t even paying attention to her; what was ordinary in 3000 B.C. is a familiar groove by 1300. The walls are too close and distant at once.

“There must have been a mix-up.” Crowley dutifully unfurls them. “I’m sure there’s no cause for all this.” Her tongue hangs heavy in her mouth. She braces herself, every nerve in her body lit with anticipation, even though nothing is hurting yet; she waits for it to get bad. She feels like a leaf torn open with no time to unfurl.

“You talk too much,” says the other demon. “Hands.”

She holds them out dutifully, biting her tongue, glowering. It’s the anticipation, the need to _know_: the bit where you’re waiting, all chained up in the dark, and all you can see is heat and movement, and they’re going to come for you in five minutes or a year. Crowley crawls out her own left ear, up into the sky where she is the queen of the heavens. That’s the thing about All the Torments of Hell: you can’t bring a book to pass the time.

-

You can resign yourself to anything; it’s the unresigning that’s tricky, a perpetual game of snakes-and-ladders that sends your whole self sliding down again.

**-**

Crowley, drowning herself before the world can drown, drifts on a wave of alcohol and the melody thrumming its way out of the stone where the sound system’s speakers should be. She drifts on the world like a hellbeast in lava, sauntering back and forth between her plants and singing along too quietly for Aziraphale to hear.

Every so often, she snatches up a leaf in strict but blunted hands, and flips it over; then her hands fall languid by her sides again. The flora might be trembling with terror, but it's the wavery terror of seaweed oscillating underwater. On her blunted wave of alcohol, their fluttering becomes ocean-waves, their fear charges her demonhood like a car battery, she’s in a rippling dreamworld of lost garden underwater.

Humans have made so many substitutes for flying. Aziraphale loves rhythm, repetition, the same vibrations knocking through her soul, and orderly sort of ecstatic joy, the way strings of fiddles rise as she feels her feet begin to leap of their own accord. Crowley has been making music since before the Beginning, and you can _hear _it, somehow, as the demon sings along to human music under her breath, husky and off-key and perfect. Aziraphale titters on the edges of her feet, only slightly less drunk than her wife, the little moment caught in her throat like the sob of a song.

-

“...must you be so ungodly determined to destroy yourself.” Aziraphale kicks off her flannel slippers as she climbs into the bed where her wife is drinking from the bottle with her knees curled to her chest. It’s a familiar position for the angel, and she lays herself against her wife’s shoulders like a heavy blanket. Crowley is a slim white-and-red-flame nestled into the black quilt with embroidered white stars that Aziraphale had purchased in the previous century and tossed over her during a century-long nap.

“Let it ssssink in.” If she’s going for wryness, all that comes across is a drunken hiss. “Can’t destroy me. Un-_god_-ly. O’rb’ros,” mumbles Crowley. “Snake eatin’ – eating m’sself…”

Aziraphale sighs, and very gently tugs her wife’s free hand into her own. Crowley’s fingers are clammy to her touch, as though all the hellfire that keeps her coldblooded body warm is now being channelled into…

“You’re scorching the carpet again, dearest,” the angel whispers very gently.

She scowls and looks down. Smoke rises from the singed threads alongside the bed. “Thinking too much,” the demon mutters, continuing to think too much, except that her thoughts are underwater and she’s watching them through a mirror from below.

“Well, we can’t have that,” says Aziraphale, her hand at Crowley’s jaw, tilting their faces together. It fuzzes out; Crowley floats. Aziraphale is trying to be in love with her and she’s trying to drink and she feels so ugly and awful that Aziraphale dares to be so warm and gentle and angelic-soft against her numb corporation. But somehow she _is_, and she drifts, on this raft of a bed.

“...just get some rest,” her wife is saying, as Crowley refuses to sober, reaches for oblivion and sleep and claws away from it at the same time.

The alcohol is pulling her under. “You’ll be here?”

“I’ll be here. I _will_ have to punish you for this, of course,” she adds, with a bit of _that _edge creeping into her voice. To remind her to stay present in the drowning dark, to sit with it occasionally as she’d promised. “Tomorrow,” she adds, at the woozy wide-eyed _now?_ in Crowley’s yellow eyes.

“Nnrgh. You’re so kind to me,” the demon mumbles into her shoulder, now with a spark of anticipation alight in her belly under the absurd coziness of Aziraphale cradling her like an injured bird. And the demon may have Fallen because she couldn’t have blind faith in God, but oh _someone_ having real, boundless Faith in her angel is such a comfort that she would do anything Aziraphale could ever ask of her, if only she weren’t so sleepy.

-

Crowley leaves monuments, carvings in stone that wear out under time’s fingers, subway maps and the lines of roads, glass buildings in other peoples’ names. Crowley has seen whole cities go up like fireworks and vanish into obscurity. Humans swallowed and forgotten. Past Crowleys like old snakeskins, past Crowleys hung from walls and stretched across racks until sense-of-self falls through the gaps between bones. 

-

“I fucking _loved _Creation.” The vodka has begun to tilt the room at a 45-degree angle, and somehow Aziraphale’s shoulder has gotten under her arm. Crowley feels her whole body sag comfortably lopsided like an overwatered houseplant, a leaning tower. “_Loved_ Creation,” Crowley slurs again, more slowly, accidentally misting Aziraphale with the plant mister while the angel is still holding her upright.

Aziraphale’s breath catches in her throat while her wife is a dead weight hanging from her shoulder. She’s accidentally called a few hummingbirds in through the window, where they flit in ethereal circles around her head, feeding on the trumpet-shaped blooms of one of the houseplants above.

Crowley can see the bird that lights briefly on her own shoulder before flitting away, but her blunted nerves can’t seem to register its touch. “I dunno, wasn’t seeing eye to eye with certain angels, alright… But I really wanted... really _could’ve_...” whatever word is meant to go there is so far beyond her to verbalize that she can’t begin to fish it out from her ever-deepening puddle of a humanoid nervous system.

As they have this conversation once per millennium, by now the angel knows not to speak, only to manoeuvre them into collapsing against the sofa in a tangle of alcohol and limbs, tenderly prying the plant mister from her wife’s hands. She adjusts her position so that Crowley is leaned against her shoulder.

A tall wave is rising and if the demon stops speaking, she’ll drown. “ ’ss just – complete ‘n utter compliance ‘r you’re out in the dark. No exemptions. No sssecond chances. No more Grace. Totalitarian.”

**-**

The fire in the bookshop is everything that Hell tries to be and pales by comparison: the office downstairs is the Absence of God, but there is _no _absence stronger than the absence of Aziraphale. Crowley understands why the lilies shrivel into husks and the forget-me-nots forget to flower. But then Aziraphale is alive, and something is blooming inside Crowley again, too.

-

There’s a knot hollowing out in the pit of Crowley’s stomach, made of whiskey and soul-hunger and henbane-smoke and shame and an ache that her bones cannot dislodge. The eighteenth century is a corset, and she is an eyelet.

Sleep, the bed calls to her, dream of Aziraphale while she’s away, dream of a world where you are together in every moment. And she wonders if there’s something sinister in that dreaming – Aziraphale’s eyes that aren’t real, luring her downwards, sleep sleep, she’s sinking into the sands of Time until she’s submerged, and the tide comes in, where are your footprints?

If she stops living in legends and myths and spending her days with inebriated poets and artists, she’ll be back in the cell in her head, the one from before the Garden, when there seemed no chance at experiencing even the slightest trace of love again. If she spends one more moment awake on this Earth, she’ll tear out all her own feathers and be devoured by the ghost of metal under her skin. If she sleeps, she will have to leave her body lying here vulnerable, to trust that she will awaken again and that no harm will come to her corporation in the meantime.

Before the humans sleep, they recite: _I pray the Lord my soul to keep._

Crowley freefalls into slumber and trusts her wife to wake her in the event of any major wars or civilization collapse.

\- 

And she awakens after twenty years soaring painless on steady vulture-wings and landing languid in the clouds to lie back and watch the stars wheeling above – and who do these dreams think they’re kidding, anyway? Heaven was all business, no joy-flights, no relaxing to admire your handiwork – and she gazes at the ceiling, clinging to the last threads of dream and grasping them in her hands like kite-strings, floating on a sea as high as the one that took her whole first millennia on Earth away with it. For a moment too heartbroken to move, she thinks: is_ this _what I am doing with my precious, beautiful freedom before Eternity snatches away the Earth and all its joys? With my one terrible and resplendent chance at Existence? Passing out in dreams until Eternity hits me in the face like a low doorframe?

Yes, she agrees, flipping the pillow over and burying her face in silk once more, grimacing into the fabric as she thrashes her body around in odd sigil-shapes to dislodge the pain in her hips, that’s _exactly _what I’m doing. There’ll be no naptime in Eternity, no matter who triumphs.

Then Aziraphale rambles in with half-drunk tea in one hand, an open book in the other, blundering into the door as she reads. It’s only then that she sees that the demon is awake, and at once her smile is a lighthouse.

-

Sometimes, it catches up with her, too raw for a story, no goddess bedecked in gold, no smooth descent. Only sensory-memory in snapshots of touch and smell, linoleum and the slime of demon-fingers pinning her wrists, tug of plastic against snakeskin. The frame of pressurized wood speckled with black-mould pressing against the corner of her cheekbone.

She’s a creature of the Great Below, sure, and not easily startled, but no demonic corporation is fully prepared for the thing that happens when you’re making breakfast for your wife, and then your hands are pinned back and your body is being dismantled and you are powerless to stop it. Which is confusing when the hands are on your shoulders Aziraphale’s, and no one has pinned you at all, because your fingers are tense around the handle of the tea kettle.

Demons don’t vomit, so she only stands here, nauseous, with a great carcass of memory inside her like a slaughtered beast. She is dangling gruesome in her own skeleton.

-

She is dangling, defenceless, in the dark of her own bedroom, as Aziraphale sets her candle down (an electric light just doesn’t have the right _ambiance_) and holds up something else she’s been carrying – a sprig from the violet plant, which she tucks behind Crowley’s ear. It’s the angel’s half of their agreement: more of an adornment than a gift. Aziraphale’s hand brushing her ear sends shocks to the tips of Crowley's toes. In the near-dark the angel is visible mostly as movement and heat, expression shrouded.

The candle tosses enough light that she catches the outline and form of Crowley’s corporation. Using the touch of Crowley’s body to find her way to the floor, wandering past the place where she knows that Orion and Serpens grace her side and hip, Aziraphale comes to kneel at her feet. Oh holy queen of the heavens, she thinks, _(I pray the Lord can’t hear me now)_, “You’ve been so, so good for me, dearest. And I need you to promise you’ll be good just a tad longer and not come until I’ve gotten the lights back on. Can you do that for me?”

If she weren’t too aroused to speak, Crowley might say: holy _fuck _I don’t know if I’ve been here for days or _years._ Instead, she nods visibly, wordless and eager with the amorous ecstasy of her lover returning after so long in isolation, so long imagining that the dark has sharp edges. Her heart dances in her throat.

“Oh, look at you,” she breathes, kissing her way back up her thighs, “so very brave and patient. You see how nice it can be, being alone, waiting for me.”

Obediently she lets Aziraphale part her legs with her hands, as she fights the defensive instinct to wrap them snakelike around her wife’s back, to take charge, keep her here, _you wouldn’t leave me again?_ Instinct tells her that a touch in the semidarkness should mean metal, fear, pain, and yet somehow the lightest brush of the angel’s hand between her legs makes pleasure bubble up like magma in her belly. She can already feel herself wet with arousal and not-quite-fear. Aziraphale keeps her fingers clenched, pressing her hand against the sensitive place to the side of her slit and rolling it in slow circles as Crowley’s hips rock forward toward the contact.

The demon’s breath hitches as Aziraphale begins to work her open with one finger, then two. Every time the angel’s knuckles brush against her clit, she fights to keep her promise.

A third finger joins the others. She turns her hand to the side and begins to move it slowly back and forth, and Crowley feels a twist of energy spiralling through her. Crowley’s body writhes in defenceless euphoria against the wall, skeletal thighs twitching as Aziraphale’s free hand holds her in place. She twists her hand again, bending her fingers, and Crowley’s muscles clench, hips buckle, half a ragged word in her throat.

“Now, now.” Abruptly, the hands are gone. Their sudden absence makes Crowley’s wrists strain naturally at their bonds, at the flicker of defenselessness tearing through her body with the sudden absence of touch. “Remember what I told you.”

The angel doesn’t wait for a response, but returns now with her lips and tongue and the seeming determination to drive Crowley out of her mind.

“Can't,” Crowley gasps, her whole body whining with the last shred of restraint, “Angel, I’m going to – ”

“Oh, no you're not.” There’s an absolutely devilish teasing edge to Aziraphale’s voice, and the sound of her getting to her feet, “you’ve been so brave and strong, taking your punishment, waiting for me for so very long. You wouldn’t disobey me now, would you?”

Crowley makes a noise. Aziraphale has backed up just out of her reach, which somehow intensifies the cold of the half-open window and the wall at her back.

“_Answer_ me.”

“Never,” breathes Crowley, “Master. But. _Please._”

Aziraphale stands on tiptoes, puts two fingers to her lips to silence her.

_“Please_,” she repeats into Aziraphale’s wet fingers, sharp teeth grazing her skin, hungry for contact.

“Patience,” Aziraphale chastises, pressing her fingers more firmly to stay Crowley’s begging. “I wouldn’t want to have to leave you again.”

_You wouldn’t._

The tiny bit of teasing around the blue of her angel’s eyes agrees that she wouldn’t. “But you _must _wait until I’ve gotten you down from there.” Aziraphale continues, as calm as if Crowley weren’t on the verge of sanity. It takes Aziraphale a thousand years to untie her wrists, while Crowley’s whole body is yearning at the speed of light.

She lets her body do the small trust-fall sideways, back into Earth’s natural gravity and the order of things, and Aziraphale catches her in her angelic-warrior arms to carry her to the bed on the opposite side of the room. It's just as well, because Crowley's legs are trembling so that she isn’t sure she could stand.

The angel lights enough candles for a temple with a blink of her eyes. She’s miracled the bedclothes into some altogether too-celestial combination of white and gold silk and blue tartan, which Crowley tries to appreciate. Her body is so alight that it hardly registers that Aziraphale is laying her down on her absurdly heavenly-themed bed, wonderfully warm after the edge of too-cold – because the the mattress against her back, her newly-freed wrists, the lamplight, are all telling her, _almost, almost now –_

Aziraphale spreads Crowley’s legs again, sticky and wet, and dives back in between them, looping one of Crowley’s knees over her shoulder. Crowley grabs at her hand, needy, hips shifting, and Aziraphale’s hardly returned her fingers to her sex before she’s ready to let go.

Aziraphale thinks only of how she loves Crowley’s shuddering gasps of pleasure as she keeps her hand where it is, feeling aftershocks through her fingers, Crowley looks so fantastically undone, so unbelievably trusting. This fantastic being, she thinks, this radiant soul held together with snakeskin and electromagnetic energy. Three orgasms later, she thinks: this is something like what it would be, to pull Crowley out of that darkness forever.

-

Aziraphale tugs up the window-shades, just a few inches, sending a shaft of light across the room.

“A bit of sunlight is _good _for you,” the angel insists, as Crowley grabs the quilt from the bed and holds it up to shield her face. When the demon sleeps for over a decade, it can take a few days for her to get up. But Aziraphale knows that she’s been wallowing here in the fear-ridden sallow dark, clinging to the place between dreams and waking, for altogether too long.

“_Good_ for _you_,” Crowley grumbles. “Good isn’t good for me, angel.”

“_Helpful _for you. Come, now, you’re a demon, not a vampire,” Aziraphale rebukes blithely, holding out the sunglasses that her wife had left on the opposite side of the bed. “Human bodies require sunlight occasionally.”

Crowley grumpily slides the glasses on, mouth already twitching into a smile – not because of the unnecessary shaft of sunshine now falling across the demon’s knees in what had previously been a cozy candle- and firelit room. Aziraphale wants to bring her to the sunlight, and after thousands of years, still, somehow it never grows old. “Yes! Light. Absolutely. We should go out. There’s _Macbeth _tonight.”

“_I’m _not the one drinking wine from a teacup at nine in the morning, dear,” Aziraphale chides, as she ties the second curtain back.

Crowley looks down. She hadn’t _intended _to alter the tea, though you can’t blame the angel-wing mug for knowing her needs. She always drinks from the same one, with the most chipped paint from the clay-feathered handle; Aziraphale would have miracled it back to health, nicer than ever before, and had once attempted to get her another from her absurdly large angel mug collection, but Crowley had clung to _this _one and sometime later Aziraphale had stuck sparkling golden star stickers around the outside. _Sunlight _would be a world where Crowley’s mug can hang with the others behind the kettle, she thinks, not stashed behind a stack of unseemly books to explain away its demonic aura.

-

“Now _that's _what I call playing with fire,” Crowley-as-Aziraphale singsongs, eyeing her wife out of the corner of her eye, at once nauseous to think of Aziraphale facing down all the lords of Hell alone, giddy with relief. She can’t read her wife’s expression, unaccustomed to peering in through her own sunglasses from the outside, but catches lopsided swaying of the other's knees.

The joy that rushes through Crowley when she realizes she will never have to return to Hell makes her feel strong enough to lift a car, unless Aziraphale’s corporation feels like this all the time. “Can I pick you up?” she hisses, not wanting to startle her. “Please.”

“Oh, alright,” Aziraphale knows that this shaking in her bones is going to carry over into her own corporation, knows already that she will fall apart later – but for the moment she is victorious, she has ascended the escalator and she herself has, in a manner of speaking, carried Crowley’s body out of Hell.

Without pause, Crowley scoops up her wife in her own corporation with Aziraphale's strong arms and carries her over the threshold and through the revolving door like the honeymoon doorway they hadn’t had at their ancient wedding. For a few absurd steps, they’re caught in glass, before the door swings away behind them. The angel’s laughter shivers and dances through her own arms as she sets her on the London sidewalk outside, slipping an arm under hers to support her.

When they kiss fearlessly outside the office door, new shocks of dandelion and speedwell already sprout from cracks in the sidewalk. By the time they reach their bench in the park, Aziraphale has summoned inadvertent nightingales into the trees, which are twice as green as they've ever been.


End file.
